In Anjum Hasan’s History’s Angel, a middle-aged Muslim teacher of History is caught between the past and the present. Often living in his own head, constantly seeing layers of history in the present moment, Alif is a man curiously out of time with his surroundings. One day, a cruel comment from a student leads Alif to twist his ear in frustration, and his life begins to unravel.
History’s Angel is a moving, poetic exploration of a city poised at the brink of chaos, in a country built on layers of interweaving, complex histories. It is a novel of the everyday, examining the range of complex emotions and responses we bring to our surroundings. Equal parts funny and eye-opening, this is a novel about the past and the future, told through our increasingly unstable present.
I spoke with Anjum Hasan about Alif’s similarities to Hamlet, the role of fiction in polarised times, and how she writes the ‘everyday’. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Most of your books are rooted in the places they’re set in. In History’s Angel, you bring to life the Delhi that your characters inhabit. Why did you decide to write a Delhi novel?
It's a question I am still asking myself, because there wasn’t anything obvious about it. My previous novels are set in places that I’ve lived in and loved. Not so with Delhi, I haven’t lived there and I don’t know if I can say that I wholeheartedly love it, but it is a city that draws me back. I was trying to write about the place as an insider, even though I’m an outsider. I thought that challenge would be interesting.
It’s a city to which my parents belonged before they moved to Shillong, where I was born and grew up. My mother, in fact, arrived in Delhi when she was eight years old, and her history is connected to that city. I was always fascinated by this place that was a kind of a shadow home, or an alternative possible home, but not a real home.
Even though [the book] is not exclusively about Muslims, quite a lot of its characters are north Indian Muslim, and to me the best big city to set a novel about what it feels like to be that today, would be Delhi. Then, of course, there’s the Mughal architecture and the layers of Indian history that you see in Delhi, and the proximity to a certain kind of politics and display of power. All of that went into the mix and made me take this leap into a city that has so much literature on it.
Can you tell us more about the challenge of writing about Delhi from the perspective of a local, as an outsider yourself?
Not so hard once I had started, because I was making several trips. I lived there for a stretch for four months. I think some of the writing on Delhi also helped a great deal. For instance, William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns. There’s nothing that I directly borrowed from it, but that was very inspiring as an involved, personalised book on living in Delhi.
Ultimately, really, it’s about the characters for me. Everything had to be channelled through Alif, who is someone who has never left Delhi. He doesn’t like to travel, and he’s lived nowhere else. Delhi is his whole universe. To me, that was really interesting — how does somebody who has lived there all his life see it? How does he channel all these things that are so familiar to him?
Alif seems to live in the past, thinking about history. Yet he also seems to be running away from personal histories, like his father’s past, or his own past with Prerna [his old flame]. How did you approach writing this contradiction?
Alif is somebody who prefers to live in his head and not necessarily deal with the more immediate challenges in his personal or work life. He’s not a confrontational person who intervenes when he sees trouble, he likes to retreat. Sometimes that can come across like a moral failing in his character. But I wanted that contrast, somebody who’s not very practical-minded, not a doer, shy, a daydreamer. The fact that he has this wonderful grip on the history of the city and the history of the country seemed like an anachronism to me. He doesn’t always have what are known as life skills, but he’s valuable in another way that is not recognised as valuable anymore.
Of course, he doesn’t always get away with it. There is a price to pay for not living in the present. I think the life of action is sometimes overrated, but then to be too much of a thinking figure can also be dangerous. The contrast is like Hamlet and Don Quixote. There’s a wonderful essay by Turgenev, the Russian writer, on Hamlet and Don Quixote. He sets up a binary between these two characters, because Don Quixote is always rushing out to do things; he’s a man of action, even if the action is misplaced. He will want to help people in distress and will charge at imaginary enemies, believing they are real. Hamlet is so in his head, unsure of what would be the right thing to do, always agonising. Turgenev’s point is that these two characters are contemporaries — Don Quixote was created around the same time that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet — so in a way they’re both modern figures, but very different models for how to live.
I don’t recall if I was thinking explicitly of that essay but it now seems to me a really good way to understand Alif, because he is a bit of a Hamlet character who sees too much. He’s very sensitive, but he doesn’t want to dirty his hands or take sides. His positions can be a cop-out. To me there’s a certain charm in that he tries to be the non-actor, but like I said, it can also come with a price.
In a scene in the book, Alif and his wife visit someone who is intent on provoking them as Muslims. A frustrating moment follows, where Alif refuses to stand up for himself, and you want to shake him a bit.
Absolutely! His wife gets agitated while he tries to remain neutral. Maybe he’s just not seeing what is obvious to his wife, and to the reader.
I think I was also trying to create a contrast between a character like Alif’s and people who are very sure of their actions and opinions – too much virulence in opinions, and too much readiness to act – which we see a lot of. Alif would like to take a more rounded view of things and is able to see other points of view. But in situations of threat, where people are obviously nasty or prejudiced, it doesn’t quite work.
There’s a line in the book about a “biryani-vs-Brahminism” view of history. There aren’t easy answers in History’s Angel. How do you see this novel, or fiction in general, in this space of creating room for nuanced conversations?
There are no easy answers, but at the same time, very decisive things happen. Life has its own momentum. Things are happening, but the characters need not always be feeling just one thing. Instead, they could be undergoing upheaval, changes of heart, or may be like Alif, who prefers to remain a witness, somebody who’s just sizing things up.
What fiction does is it creates a contrast between the emotion and the event. The events are clear – if a murder happens, if people are obviously hurting each other, if there are larger historical changes happening that individuals can’t control – those things are impossible for fiction to neutralise or be ambivalent about. But how do people respond in the areas of emotions, convictions, or doubts? That’s what I like to explore.
To me, good fiction takes the characters along in a sweep of events, without telling us what would be the best reaction or the best thing to do. Even if we’re looking at a very problematic time, in terms of these polarities and divisions, it’s really just a way of throwing some ‘complicated’ light on events, hoping that readers find themselves able to engage with it and navigate it.
I found the character of Ankit [the student who provokes Alif] very interesting, as a starting point for different intriguing ideas. One of those is how children can imbibe or mimic the behaviour they see around them, but it was also striking how helpless one can feel in a situation where children are just cruel.
I don’t quite buy the idea that children are always ‘child-like’ or innocent. Ankit is a victim in some ways, he is lonely and has a troubled family background. Of course, children can sometimes be very difficult and you can’t explain it. I wanted to see Alif challenged by a child because he really loves his children and teaching, and he’s a devoted father. But then he meets his match in Ankit. I thought it would be interesting to see what happens if a committed teacher who is trying to always draw in his students finds somebody who won’t buy it.
It’s not just that Ankit is naughty, but that he also seems derisive. There’s something about the native intelligence of a child that can be very unsettling to an adult. Fiction allows you to bring that up. Fiction allows you to talk about lots of things that you can’t in polite society.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India is very present in the novel. How did you think of incorporating it?
I was reading it every single day that I was writing the book. I think it’s an incredible idea that one can treat India like this timeless entity, almost human, to whom all this has happened and who has lived through different epochs, and now is in a late and tired phase of her existence. It’s a very enjoyable book that has an emotional core, yet manages to be unsentimental.
Alif is very taken by the sweep and grandeur of that book. He feels this ambivalent awe for Nehru — even though he has some quarrels with the man, Alif is still a huge admirer of his vision. To me, it’s a book worth thinking about and rereading and quarrelling with and learning Indian history from. It’s a fascinating book to read in today’s atmosphere, simply because of the liberality — it’s such a liberal, broad vision of the country and its place in the world. My novel was a tribute to Discovery through Alif.
The language in History’s Angel is beautiful — there’s a rhythm and cadence to your sentences that are so arresting. How do you approach writing as a craft?
I guess I’ve just grown old doing this. It’s been tempering and simmering in my head for so long. It all boils down to the English language for me, and the struggle to keep it alive, to not ever assume that I know the words in which I want to tell my story (I never really do). I may know the story, but the language will have to be invented afresh.
Having written all these books I’ve reached a point where I know where the language is going — I know where it’s slowing down and I know where it sounds adequate but it doesn’t sound good. The language has to wake up the reader. The plot is not the most important thing for me, even though I need to have a workable plot. Instead, the sound of the person thinking and speaking is way more important. Once I get a hang of that, I can build on it.
The observations in History’s Angel about the younger generation were interesting. Alif says that for the present generation, “the future is already here”. How did you approach writing generational gaps and this idea of the future?
I wanted to bring in the contrast between Alif’s generation and his son’s impatient way of looking at the world. I am fascinated by that impatience and by how smart young people are in a certain way. Salim [Alif’s son] understands things about the present that Alif could never. He’s totally up to scratch with a lot of ideas. At the same time, people are feeling used up in their forties — everything is moving fast and they’re wondering for how long they will remain useful or relevant. That was the dizzying feeling I wanted to anchor in Alif, who tries to sidestep it.
History’s Angel is also about education, and discusses history education in particular. Alif, while speaking about a historical figure, mentions how important it is not to throw him out of history books. The Principal’s response is: “Throw him out of the history books? But he’s not there in the first place.” It’s such a striking moment of two people looking at the same thing differently.
There’s already attenuation of a kind in [text]books, they’re limited. Someone like Alif is an inspired teacher because he doesn’t stick to them. But now we have a reverse problem, the books themselves are the site of the battle. Not teaching, not the figure of the teacher, but the very texts, which is strange to me, because in my school days, the most important thing was not the text, it was the teacher. How much fun was she? What did she bring into the classroom? How did she enliven the ideas? It was always that for me and I think for my generation.
Now the textbook has to be sanitised, or corrupted, in a way. It’s the worst possible situation as far as learning for children goes. The terms of the debate are horrifying. For someone like Alif, the question would be, how do we make teaching more interesting and how do we make better teachers?
There are big historical events in History’s Angel, but they happen in the background. The focus in this novel is on the ordinary and the everyday — what draws you to that, in this book and in your earlier works like A Day in The Life?
I think that’s the stuff of life for me, it’s certainly the stuff of fiction. Anything else is reportage — major challenges that people face, as representatives of some demographic. You might be reported on as a particular individual, but primarily because you represent something or the other. For me, the important thing is to focus on how our relationships, street life, domesticity, food, regular conversations, cityscapes make us who we are.
Unless one starts noticing that, fiction becomes very bare. It becomes just the thoughts of a person, without the furniture of the world. Take the example of somebody I’ve been rereading lately, EM Forster. All his novels have this quality of the environment intruding, whether it’s a room or an outdoor setting, it’s so richly described and so present, to the point where sometimes it starts talking on its own. In the works of RK Narayan too, the milieu is very much alive. I would still go back to the older authors for what you’re calling this fascination with the everyday. Chekhov very much too.
Some people are put off by things that are too ordinary because they feel fiction should be elevated, about something grand. There are larger things happening in the background –to me, they are secondary – I think the everyday is where the gold is. It’s possible to cultivate that kind of noticing, realizing that one’s own world has a lot of these elements that one may have missed.
History’s Angel is Anjum Hasan’s latest novel. She is the author of The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti, Lunatic in my Head, Difficult Pleasures, and a book of poems, Street on the Hill. She has been a Homi Bhabha Fellow, a Charles Wallace Writer-in-Residence, and is currently a New India Foundation Fellow.
Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator with Champaca Books. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.
Champaca Bookstore, Café and Library is an independently-owned women-run bookstore and cafe in Bengaluru. The team chooses books with care and tries to include diverse voices and stories, from across time, place, and experience. Instagram: @champacabooks